Death,redux
by cartoon moomba
Summary: It takes Yeul three lifetimes until she stops fighting death, her lips caked with salt and lungs full of water and ash.


**Disclaimer: **Final Fantasy XIII-2 does not belong to me.

**AN: **This was originally going to be related to LR but then it just ran away with ideas and I could barely keep up.

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_Death,redux_

o

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The first Yeul does not see the future, and so she does not foretell her own death.

It happens at night – an unexpected, yet inevitable monster attack that leaves the small tribe with bloodied bodies and broken hearts. Yeul's body is found amongst the dead, her pretty face scrunched up into a visage of terror and missing several limbs from her body. Her long hair forms a blood-drenched halo around her head, the flower she always places behind one ear crushed under the weight of scavenging fiends. The survivors mourn their dead and set them aflame at a large pyre, knowing that the flames will keep any lingering monsters at bay for the rest of the day.

The white petals at Yeul's temple turn to ash and crumble, and soon, everything else does too.

The first Yeul dies at seventeen, and the countless others that come afterwards do not live a day beyond.

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Yeul is flying, held aloft by a salty breeze. She sees a grey sky, a seashore, and a city in the distance. In this silent world, someone calls her name.

_Yeul_.

She drops from her invisible wings and is drowning in the ocean, the saltwater forcing its way down her throat and into her lungs and to the lining of her stomach. She claws at her own skin with desperation, mouth wide open in a silent scream and body heavy like a boulder. Below her, she is greeted with nothing but an endless darkness.

_Yeul…_

It comes again, the voice, and she blinks and stands on solid marble floors. A monument of crystal sits before her – a throne, she realizes – and as she drips seawater, the shadows in the corners of the room seem to move.

_Come_, the voice beckons and suddenly everything is _golden. _Yeul thinks she closes her eyes (or have they been closed this entire time and she is just now opening them?) because through the gold there comes the face of a woman, long blue hair covering her cheeks. Sad green eyes stare into her own; instinctively, Yeul thinks – _Mother_.

_Yeul_, the woman whispers again, and the sensation of someone's fingers covering her eyes spread heat into Yeul's body. Suddenly she is on fire and Yeul _screams_, and keeps screaming, and wishes the woman away.

She doesn't know how long this sensation goes on for, the overwhelming force of it engulfing all of her senses. The burning starts near her eyes and spreads to her temples, then to her lips, and all the way down her body until she collapses to her knees on the cold marble, still screaming to the empty space all around her. The crystal throne is her only companion, silent and deserted.

_STOP IT! _Yeul cries out and her mouth spews out salt and ash, her stomach emptying its contents to the floor below her. Yeul is desperate. Yeul wants to die. Yeul thought she _was _dying – she remembers the monsters, and the pain and the blood, and then the darkness.

From somewhere beyond, the voice sighs. _Yeul_… it says sadly once more, and then a hole seems to open up below her.

Yeul falls.

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She opens her eyes.

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Yeul is five years old, sitting at her mother's lap when her first ever vision comes. She does not remember what she sees, except that suddenly she is in pain and her mother's face is pale and worried above her own when the gold fades out of her eyes. She tries to say something, one hand reaching out, but her lungs are full of water.

Yeul chokes, and tastes salt. Her belly is full of ash.

She closes her eyes, and drowns.

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The third Yeul passes off her strange dreams of a different life as just that – dreams. Except the one time she dreams of a Behemoth King tearing the village elder apart on a hunting trip and it happens a week later, the remaining members stumbling back into the village, wide eyed and covered with blood.

And the one time she dreams of her mother falling down a ravine, never to be seen again, and it happens the next day.

And when she dreams of a rainstorm so great that it tears down the entire settlement, she tells it to the new elder. He laughs at her childish whims and so on a day that she sees clouds gathering in the sky, she takes her belongings and makes for a cave where she spends the night, unable to sleep as thunder booms outside. In the morning she makes her way back, carefully sidestepping the puddles.

The elder greets her with what remains of their people, their entire village brought down to the ground.

"Yeul," he says her name reverently, but also gravely, almost as if it is now sacred. "You knew of this."

Yeul tilts her head. She is thirteen but feels – thirty five. The number lingers in her brain, an age that few people manage to live to. "I saw it in a dream," she says instead, looking up to stare right into the elder's eyes. "You didn't believe me when I told you. And now almost everybody is dead."

The group gathered behind him shift on their feet, muttering amongst themselves in surprise at this revelation. The elder examines her, his scrutinizing eyes taking in the resolute set of her shoulders, the stiffness of her mouth. "My grandmother," he finally says, peering down close at her. "Once had a daughter. She died when she was five. When you were born, my grandmother took one look at you and proclaimed you to be the exact girl she once bore. Your parents, by her request, named you Yeul."

Yeul's world drops out from under her. Unbidden, a name she has been hearing in her dreams matches up with a face. It slips out past her lips before she can stop it.

Something in the elder's face changes. "That is correct," he says and steps forward, placing one large hand on Yeul's shoulder. "Now, tell me Yeul, what else have you seen?"

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Her lips are caked with salt, her tongue heavy with ash. Yeul thinks she remembers this. She thinks that she has died twice already, but wonders if it has been more. She wonders if there _will _be more. From the lofty tent the village has given her (her new _status_, she thinks) she can see the curved edges of Lindzei's nest, hanging high in the twilit sky. The edges of her vision blur with a golden hue that is becoming all too familiar and she has learned to stop resisting it.

Her eyes take her to a temple. It is dark, but she thinks she sees a figure in the shadows – a girlish figure, clad in robes of silver and gold. A crown rests upon her head. Before her, a man kneels with a giant sword strapped to his back.

"Caius of the Ballads," her own voice says within the vision, and the robed figure steps out of the darkness. The identical girl's small mouth curls into a smile, her green eyes focused intently on the one she has named.

"I have long awaited your coming," she whispers,

and the Yeul beneath Lindzei's nest goes limp.

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Her mouth is full of saltwater and ash, and she is drowning.

She stops fighting it.


End file.
